Spotlight Review - 8 Reasons Why It Deserves To Be An Oscar Favourite

2. Carefully Pointing The Finger Of Blame

The important thing to bear in mind with Spotlight is that the film assumes the audience's knowledge of the atrocities at hand (it even opens with a little prologue teasing the horrors), meaning that the question at its heart isn't "What's going on?", but instead twists to be "Who's really to blame?" As the scope of the scandal goes from one priest, to a dozen, to a global epidemic, it becomes clear there's a systemic issue here that goes beyond individuals. It's a carefully escalated problem, something that's explicitly raised in the film by Liev Schreiber's incoming Globe editor Marty Baron, and the slow realisation that the city has been blighted with it knowingly is unsettling to say the least. And the resolution is not as clear cut as you'd initially think, the collective ignorance striking right at the heart of the film. McCarthy also ensures that, while Spotlight is attacking the Catholic Church as an institution, it isn't anti-religion, instead honing in on much more human fallacies.